Game review: Baby Blimp

There are tons of baby-related time management games out there. Baby Blimp makes a few changes to the typical "taking care of baby" type of game. You play a crew of storks who are preparing babies to be delivered to new parents. First, you decide the sex of the baby that will pop out of the machine. Then you have to give it a toy, feed it, clean it and put it down for a nap before it is ready for delivery. Once all of the babies are prepped for delivery, you go over to the blimp door. Each house below you will tell you what type of baby they want. It is your job, as the stork, to deliver the proper baby to each house. There are various types of storms that will get in your way so be careful!

Originally, I thought this was a cute idea. Once I started playing though, I realized that the gameplay is kinda broken. There are times that you will need to click on an object multiple times before the stork will do that action. Since the stork will only do one action at a time, it makes playing the game annoying. For example, once you change a baby's diaper, you need to throw the dirty diaper in the trash before you can do anything else. However, the game won't always register the trash can click. So your stork will just stand there stupidly until the game finally registers the trash can click. Of course, by this point babies are crying all over the place and you need to get them taken care of. The same thing happens in the delivery mode as well. So, while the game could have been really cute and fun, in the end, it's nothing but aggravating.

Game review: Kindergarten

Way back in October, I played Carrie the Caregiver 2, which was nothing spectacular. Figuring it was going to be along the same lines, I tried Kindergarten. Let me start off by saying that my daughter is currently in kindergarten so I have a pretty good grasp on what kids that age can do. This game should have been named Daycare or Babies or something. Parents drop off their little darlings and it is your job to feed them bottles (?), change their diapers (?!) and put them down for naps. While kindergarten kids do take short naps, they definitely are not bottle-fed nor are they wearing diapers. It's rather offensive to kids to put a kindergarten title on a game about babies.

The game itself is boring. In the early levels, you spend a lot of time standing around waiting for one of the babies to want something. Then it gets annoying when, for example, one child is playing in "the box" and another one immediately wants to play in it. Well, the thing only fits one kid at a time so you have to wait for the first kid to stop playing in it. Of course, this upsets the second one. It is also annoying to have to click on the rug to put one child on the floor before picking up another. You should be able to click on the second child and have them switch places. It would have made the gameplay a lot more streamlined.

Also, about this clicking on the rug thing, there are no "slots" for the kids to fit in. They basically sit wherever you click. This makes it possible for you to have two children sitting directly in front of each other. Then, if the child in the back wants something, you can't click on him/her. You need to move the front child in order to get to the back child. This could have easily been avoided by dividing the rug into invisible slots. Each child would automatically fit into the slot closest to your click. Since the children don't move around on their own, there is no reason to not have a specific spot for them to sit in.

I think that there were a lot of good intentions with this game. However, the developers just didn't pull it off very well. There were so many problems with the gameplay that I quit the game halfway through my 60 minute trial. That says a lot right there. While I would like to see the problems listed here fixed, I'd rather see them fixed as an entirely new game instead of a sequel. They need to get rid of the Kindergarten title on this one.